Raoul Wallenberg, who disappeared in 1945 after being summoned to Soviet HQ in Budapest. Photograph: EPA

Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who helped thousands of Jews escape from the Nazis during the Second World War, yesterday became the second honorary citizen of the United States, joining Winston Churchill.

The climb of Wallenberg from a footnote in the history of the Holocaust to "canonisation" by the US Congress and the White House is an extraordinary tale.

To several thousand American Jews who escaped to the US from Budapest in 1944, Wallenberg is a man whose deeds will never be forgotten. But few have been in a position to do very much about it. The Jewish lobby has had many more pressing issues to expend its energies on, notably the cause of Israel.

The election to Congress last November of Tom Lantos, from the 11th District of California, changed the political balance. As a 16-year-old boy in his native Budapest, Lantos had been seized by the Nazis and placed in a forced labour camp from which escape seemed impossible. That was until Raoul Wallenberg, a 32-year-old Lutheran from a prosperous Swedish banking family, entered the scene. Lantos was furnished by Wallenberg with a Swedish passport and his freedom was arranged by Wallenberg, who first found him a safe house and then arranged his escape from Nazi Europe.

For Wallenberg, the "saviour-angel" of Budapest, a life of freedom was denied. When the Russians moved into the city in 1945 he disappeared. Inquiries by the Swedish Government and his family yielded nothing.

Wallenberg had vanished into the labyrinth of the Gulag Archipelago. In 1947, the Russians officially declared him dead, but escapers from Russian prison camps talked of meeting in captivity a tall, gentle Swede.

The first action of Lantos, in arriving at the seat of American power, was to introduce a bill in the House of Representatives seeking to make Wallenberg an American citizen.

For the President, the Wallenberg case was a political natural. The Swedish diplomat was a human rights hero who had saved many thousands of lives, including those people who had since become American citizens. But it was also an indictment of the Russian system which could arrest a hero as a spy, lose him in the prison camps, and then declare him dead, despite claims that he was alive from a stream of escaped dissidents.

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